I'm hoping to get enough bass out of the towers to not need a sub. That is pretty much the whole reason I went to all the effort to build out this cabinet. I wanted a bigger TV, and BIG speakers. Axiom's BIG in cabinet speakers and huge center channels are awesome. This is mostly just for TV viewing. I just need to hear the bass for TV to be enjoyable.

The receiver is setup properly. I have had this receiver for awhile and I know how to operate it well. I've tried direct mode, stereo, manual setup, and then automatic setup. Nothing fixed my problem.

I think this is a polarity issue. The contractor installed the speaker wiring and probably didn't pay much attention to polarity. I hadn't considered this as the problem but now that you guys mention it that is probably the issue. I will have time to test it tonight I think.

As for a blown woofer. I don't run this system that loud. The most it has even been turned up is -10 which is loud but not oh my gosh loud. -10 is a comfortable movie watching volume while most TV is watched between -25 and -15 depending on the time of night. The flapping was more like wooshing from the speaker cones. I may have overstated that a bit. When I push on one of the 6.5" drivers I am able to get some scraping noises but only if I push it off center. This woofer will scrape easier than the other 3 but I don't think it is blown. Not that I would really know what a blown speaker is like. I assume as soon as you push it in a little bit it scrapes. This one scrapes only if I push it off center and pretty hard. The only thing I can think of about it is that maybe the babies got the speaker cover off and pushed that woofer a bit, though it looks fine. The new magnetic covers look great, but are less effective against little hands. They can pull the grills off pretty easily, but have generally left them alone.

Ok, so the polarity is correct, but I sit in a pretty big bass hole. The bass 5 feet forward sounds much better. The worst offender was actually from the center channel and when I had that turned to full range it canceled out the bass from the mains. I turned it to cross over at 120 hz and it fixed the issue on test tones. I think this will be ok since the bass goes to the mains and not a sub that can be localized in the corner. I got about 5 extra db from doing this. Kinda a bummer I got the VP160 but hey, whatever. It looks cool in there. I'll keep working on it tomorrow. My wife is furious about the buzzing from the family room. I have not been able to test it with actual material since I've been kicked out of the room. Thanks everyone for your help.

Ok, so I still have a bit of a bass hole. Are there ways to fix this with settings in the receiver? Distance settings or reversing polarity on one of the speakers? Or can I put up bass traps? There aren't really any good places to put up traps and I can't move the speakers. I could move the couch a bit closer to the TV but only by a foot or so.

Bass traps won't help. You have too little bass, not too much. There are no settings on the receiver that will fix this. You have to move the seating area--and sometimes a foot or so will make a huge difference. An old friend and former colleague, Dr. Floyd Toole, scientist and acoustician, once measured and graphed the bass response differences in the three different seats on a single couch, and the audible bass would vary as much as 10 to 15 dB or more. Such differences make the difference between hearing virtually no bass and hearing too much. (He called the room "the forgotten component" and it's so true.)

Play a recording with lots of good deep bass and walk around the room slowly noting the areas where the bass seems good but not overpowering --- that's the spot where you should move the couch. Don't feel victimized. Virtually every room has lots of areas of cancellation and reinforcement caused by standing waves and the particular dimensions of the room interacting with the speaker/sub locations and the seating area.

Moving the couch is the only way to combat this? Bummer. I used test tones and it was very clear where the bass was and wasn't and my whole couch was in a null. 5 feet up was a peak but I don't really want to move up 5 feet. I'll give it a try with one or two feet and see what happens.

I didn't reverse the polarity. They were all set right. I thought maybe since I have problems with waves canceling each other out, that I could reverse the polarity of one of the speakers to move the bass hole somewhere else. It's just something I thought of from my understanding of waves. I have no idea if it is a proper way of fixing a bass hole.

Moving the m60s sounds like a good experiment. I'm not sure I'll be able to do it. I rarely get time to myself in the family room since we have 2 kids who just turned 1 and that's their play area. At night bass experiments won't go over well. Thanks for everyone's tips. I'm glad it is not something wrong with the m80s. I had a nagging feeling something was broken and that is gone now. The bass is strong enough for me just 5 feet forward so I'll try to get that working for me somehow.

By the way, autoboy, your tests of the bass drivers were fine; you'd only hear a scraping sound if the driver was killed when you pushed the driver in and out with equal pressure around the cone (the scraping sound results from a warped voice coil that's been fused or melted by the DC current from clipping and its travel is no longer linear).

The annoying thing about a bass null is that you can't use EQ to boost it or fix it -- to supply bass in the hole where there is none. If you had a bass peak, you could use EQ to reduce the peak in that listening seat. If everything else checks out--and it seems like it does--then moving the couch is the only solution.

Can you not move the couch back farther to an area where there's good bass?